Social Media

3 Ways Pinterest Could Be Even Better

Pinterest continues to grow and could soon top Twitter, a social media site that had a two-year head start on the picture-centric pinboard site. According to Pew Research Center, the two sites are neck and neck: 15% of Americans use Pinterest, and 16% use Twitter.

The Pinterest team hasn't been idle over the past year. Pinterest has added pages for businesses, mobile apps, secret boards, and it has a major redesign in the works. But what pinners want most, isn't included in the new design.

On behalf of ladies who pin, here's what Pinterest could do to make its avid users happier (most of whom are female, outnumbering men four to one).

Search Your Own Pins

You can't search your own pins, and that's a problem. According to Repinly, a Pinterest directory that tracks pins, pinners and trends, popular pinners have each created around 35 boards and pinned 2,757 photos on average. Sifting through pins for that perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe that you pinned six months ago can take far too long.

Boards display only the last few pins added, so if you have a lot of pins, like Anilú Magloire's "Home Love" board, ranked No. 1 on Repinly with more than 22,000 photos, good luck finding a specific pin.

Moving Pins

Related to the searching function, you should be able to rearrange pins within a board. Pins are placed in chronological order, meaning the first photos pinned appear at the bottom of a board. While Pinterest lets you choose a photo to feature, and you can change these board cover photos at any time, you only have one option for changing the order of pins: delete and re-pin.

Browse the Web on Smartphones

In an update last August, Pinterest added its own, built-in browser to its iPad app, leaving iPhone and Android without the nifty feature. (On the desktop version, pinners add a "Pin it" button to their browsers so they can pin a photo from any website that hasn't blocked the function.)

On an iPad, pinners type in a web address, visit a site and can pin a photo using the "Pin it" button. If you're using a smartphone, however, you have to take a screenshot with your phone and then pin from your camera roll. For those who pin, this is simply too much work.

Pinterest has not responded to our questions about new features, but testers thus far have posted only complaints about the redesign. Some don't like the bigger photos; they'd rather see more pictures on the screen. And many complain that they can't see who has re-pinned their pins: "Please get me out of this testing phase and back to how it was," Jena Dacres Thiele commented. "Or change it to tell us what pins were re-pinned and when."

In response to comments on the blog, Pinterest has said it will not add any new editing features to the update, and the mobile apps will remain unchanged.

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